June 22, 2022

Launching 10 local newsletters across Central Finland

How Mediatalo Keskisuomalainen are using JAMES Automation and Personalisation to step-up their newsletter strategy

Finnish Regional Publisher Mediatalo Keskisuomalainen joined the JAMES Launch Partner Programme in August 2021. As a regional publisher with tens of titles, Mediatalo Keskisuomalainen were looking for a solution which could be easily adopted across different regional newsrooms. After receiving funding from the Facebook Accelerator Programme, Mediatalo Keskisuomalainen chose to work with JAMES to launch their newsletters.


Why JAMES?

Email newsletters have not been a significant news product in Finland since the share of direct traffic is high. Therefore, after seeing the success on newsletters in other countries, Mediatalo Keskisuomalainen identified email as an under utilised channel in their news distribution with subscribers. Whilst newsletters did exist in their newsrooms, these were often based off an RSS feed and emails were not performing well.

We wanted to spice up our emails so it was a perfect match to ask Twipe to introduce JAMES to us.

Johannes Niemeläinen, Data Manager at Mediatalo Keskisuomalainen

With a desire to spice up their emails, particularly for onboarding and retention, Mediatalo Keskisuomalainen decided to look around the publishing world. After noticing the success of the JAMES Project at The Times of London, Mediatalo Keskisuomalainen became inspired by JAMES and its’ personalisation power. After choosing to adopt JAMES, Mediatalo Keskisuomalainen identified 3 key needs to be addressed:

  1. Automated and personalised newsletter production to have better email results
  2. Opening up an effective new digital channel to deliver news to customers.
  3. Reinvent onboarding and retention journeys

Impact on JAMES newsletters on subscribers

After launching a month early in October 2021, 10 titles are now live with JAMES. Mediatalo Keskisuomalainen now deliver 250,000 personalised newsletters to their subscribers each week. Early results across the different titles have been promising. As we have seen with other JAMES customers, Mediatalo Keskisuomalainen have witnessed a growth in habitual reading.

Beyond habitual reading, the Finnish publisher have also benefited from a growth in engagement metrics. Click rates for JAMES Personalised Newsletters have increased by 4.5%. This figure is still below the average of other JAMES customers and is somewhere the collaboration is continuing to develop now that readers are in the habit of consuming email news.


Impact of JAMES newsletters on onboarding

In Summer 2022, Mediatalo Keskisuomalainen will also be analysing the results of their onboarding and retention experiment with JAMES. For the experiment, half of new trial subscribers have been exposed to JAMES personalised newsletters, whilst half have not. Exclusive early insights are promising, with those who are exposed to JAMES more likely to become a paying subscriber than the non-exposed group.


Sending JAMES newsletters with the Twipe Email Sending Service

Mediatalo Keskisuomalainen chose to use the Twipe Emailing Sending Service which was co-developed as part of the programme. This was crucial for the success of the project since Mediatalo Keskisuomalainen own provider did not allow for personalisation. The Twipe team built this in July prior to the launch of the project in August 2021 so that the team could get straight into the details.

Inside the template, specially designed templates are available to be used across newsletters.


Future plans with JAMES

Mediatalo Keskisuomalainen want to take JAMES personalisation to the next level. Unlike many newsrooms who have been reluctant to adopt AI, the newsroom at Mediatalo Keskisuomalainen have embraced JAMES and have been curious to see how it works. This enthusiasm has now seen them become keen to introduce JAMES to certain aspects of their websites to see if performance is boosted. Elsewhere, Johannes and the data team are exploring the case for using personalisation in push notifications. JAMES personalisation can be widely adopted across products.

We are seeing newsletters as more important in the future as we build onboarding and retention processes.

Johannes Niemeläinen, Data Manager at Mediatalo Keskisuomalainen

Why Twipe?

One of the key features that stood out was the easy flexible nature of the Twipe teams. With regular stand-ups and data dive sessions, contact between publisher and provider has been crucial to the success of the project.

Twipe’s flexibility also impressed Mediatalo Keskisuomalainen and they were able to go live ahead of schedule. With a scheduled launch date of November 2021, Twipe and Mediatalo Keskisuomalainen were able to launch their first personalised newsletter in October 2021. Johannes had never been involved in a project where launch was ahead of schedule. This was down to the hard work, commitment and desire of both the Twipe and Mediatalo Keskisuomalainen teams.

I have not been involved in another project where we launched the actual product ahead of schedule.

Johannes Niemeläinen, Data Manager at Mediatalo Keskisuomalainen

Accelerate your roadmap to automated and personalised newsletters

JAMES can help your organisation serve your readers with the content they love automatically to build habits crucial for retention and conversion. Contact us now to learn more about how JAMES AI Personalised and Automated Newsletters can help your newsroom.

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